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Friday, July 31, 2009

In the BI community we know that the pervasive adaptation of Business Intelligence technology can have a potentially transformative effect on a company's performance, especially when BI is applied with the philosophy of "enabling action from insight." One way OBIEE currently enables action is by providing links from reports directly to the transactional source system for that data so that the end user can take action on transactions related to that data. With OBIEE 11g, Oracle will be bringing actionable insight an evolutionary jump forward with the ability to integrate tightly with BPEL Process Manager.

In this post I'd like to introduce the basic concept behind BPEL and explain its importance in the context of OBIEE.

First it's important to highlight the distinction between transactions and processes. Transactions are important. They are the lifeblood of a busienss. But we all know that a business isn't just a collection of isolated transactions. Instead, we work with processes: For example, if the inventory level for Product X hits a certain threshold, someone has to make a decision about whether to reorder that item. The responsible party typically has one or more process she follows before she takes a business action and these processes are often comprised of both human and systems activities.

Historically the primary role of IT has simply been to support the "tech" side of a business in isolation from the processes that the tech supports. Consequently there has arisen a kind of division -- too often hostility -- between IT and the business it serves. One manifestation of this divide happens when attempting to keep any sort of process documentation: so often, as soon as the documentation is complete it is rendered obsolete. Any kind of documented understanding of the process has little relevance to the process itself, almost to the point that the process Once the documentation is complete.

But as tech becomes more tightly woven into the conduct of our activities, the complexity of the human/tech interactions in any given business process -- and the speed with which these interactions can change -- has likewise grown. Smartly managing and supporting these processes requires a healthy understanding of how the whole system interacts.

Enter BPEL - Business Process Execution Language - an XML-based language developed to describe in a systematic way the orchestration of steps within a business process. It combines the more-or-less "human readable" qualities of XML with the rigor of a real programming language. With BPEL, in a very real sense the processes themselves and the documented description of the processes are one and the same. BPEL is a very powerful way to bridge the business / IT divide: it challenges the business to unambiguously define exactly what they do and it requires IT to implement the tech components to support these activities exactly as described by the business.

Now, BPEL is a unique, "human readable" programming language, but in the end it's just that: a language. It needs a vehicle for executing the instructions defined in the BPEL program. The mechanism for executing these instructions is a BPEL Server, or "Engine." Several BPEL Engine products have been developed over the years, including Oracle's own BPEL Process Manager, which is one component of their SOA Suite.

What does all this have to do with OBIEE? Well imagine the reorder decision scenario above. Instead of simply linking to an inventory management system, OBIEE can let the user initiate the entire reorder evaluation BPEL process directly in BPEL Process Manager - which will in turn invoke other systems and human actions before the final click of the "Reorder" button. Or OBIEE can even invoke the process on its own based on user-defined thresholds, and let the process take its established course.

I have only begun to scratch the surface of exactly what BPEL is or how to use it. I encourage a deeper look into BPEL and the features of Oracle's BPEL Process Manager to truly appreciate the potential application of this technology in a BI implementation. Here are a few good places to start:

Thursday, July 30, 2009

BI Consulting Group co-hosted a hands-on workshop with Oracle in Minneapolis, MN on July 28. The hands-on workshop was geared towards a Public sector audience and featured customers who have purchased Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE+) or are evaluating purchasing OBIEE+.

BI Consulting Group presented an overview of OBIEE+ as well as dove into the best practices when developing reports and dashboards as well as explained how to build a successful Public Sector BI Strategy. BICG also presented the workshop portion of the day where students were able to get hands-on experience with Answers. Students learned a lot about how to build Answers queries and how to apply best practices to Answers and dashboards.

For info on workshops and ones that are coming to a city near you, please visit:

7. Configure Managed Servers. In here specify the name of the OBI Presentation Services Server, Lisen Address which is the IP address, Listen Port typically this may be 7005

8. Skip configure clusters9. In configure machines add the name of the machine that hosts weblogic server instance

10. Assign server to the machine,review domain configuration then create Weblogic Domain and check for successfull creation of Weblogic Domain

11. Create an exploded archive directory from the analytics.ear or analytics.war fileusing the new domain, by following these steps:a. Copy the analytics.ear or analytics.war file in the \OracleBI\web directory toa destination directory, as shown in the following example.-mkdir c:mydestination\BIEE\-cp c:\OracleBI\web\analytics.war to c:mydestination\BIEE\b. Manually unpack the analytics.ear or analytics.war file using a jar command,as shown in the following example.jar -xvf manual\generic\analytics.warBy running the jar command, you create a directory called "analytics." This isthe directory where the application will be deployed

If the BI Presentation Services Server runs on a different machine from theWebLogic Server, then edit the web.xml file for the WebLogic Server to account forthis difference.

12. In a Web browser, start the WebLogic Administration Console, as shown in thefollowing example. http://hostname:7001/console13. If you have not already done so, in the Change Center of the AdministrationConsole, click Lock & Edit.

14. In the left pane of the Administration Console, click Deployments.15. Install the deployment as an application by completing the following steps:a. In the right pane, click Install.b. Select c:mydestination\BIEE and click Next.c. Select Install this deployment as an application and click Next.d. Select I will make the deployment accessible from the following location for example D:\OBIEE\Deployments\weblogic9\webapps\analytics from Source accessibility in the install application assistant window after selecting the option button for the name of the machine where OBI presentation services are deployed eg: OBIEE01

f. Then select option button for Yes take me to deployment screen, then view all screens clickin Nextg. Click Finish.

15. To activate these changes, in the Change Center of the Administration Console,click Activate Changes.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

If you want to put the Label of the prompts in front of the selection itself (intead of on the top)

1. To do this just for the current dashboard page, add a text frame to your dashboard page and add following content to it< type="text/css">td.GFPFilter br { display:none; }< /style >Set "Contains HTML Markup" chechkbox.

2. If you want to do this across all pages, edit views.css of the style you are using (S_ directory) and addtd.GFPFilter br { display:none; }

So often an organization will take on the task of installing OBIEE, establishing the infrastructure to support it, and even re-organizing their data appropriately. But when it comes to the actual report design, standards fail to be established, reports and dashboards become awkward and cumbersome, and user adoption suffers.

Since OBIEE is often seen as an Ad-Hoc reporting tool, this problem can often be the result of many developers developing with an Ad-Hoc mentality. The result is mismatched dashboards and confusing layouts. Other times, it’s the result of too many people involved in the development process. Once something gets approved by 15 people in a Power Point mock up, it’s difficult to get changes approved when something doesn’t pan out as expected. As a result, the small imperfections get set aside, but never fail to add up.

The following is a high level list of items to keep in mind when entering the report development stage of any OBIEE project. Keeping each of these items in mind will help you design attractive and useful reports and dashboards, which will ultimately lead to greater user adoption and pervasive use of the tool.

1. Trust your users - If your users don’t use your BI or other technology systems, it’s because they either get no value from it, or the system is too slow. These same users will spend their evenings shopping online and paying bills over the internet. It’s ignorant to believe they can’t use a well designed online reporting tool.

2. Think Insight, not Reports - Take the time to understand what the business user searches for, what they mark up with a yellow highlighter, and what they look at next after discovering an “exception”

3. Move Business Skills into your IT shop, not IT skills into your Business – Make an effort to understand the business needs, and then apply the technology accordingly. Don’t ask the business to “make due” with what IT provides.

4. Design your Dashboard in OBI EE itself using an iterative methodology – Don’t use Power Point to design your reports. Designing directly in OBIEE allows you to know immediately what will and will not work. Plan to make a series of adjustments throughout the design process, using feedback from the business users.

5. Establish a set of standards – If your users can’t derive insight in the first few seconds of looking at a Dashboard, it’s a bad design. This is no longer a world in which IT programmers lead the user’s impression of standards. Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Apple iPhones, etc. all lead the pack when it comes to quality interfaces and standardized interfaces.

Monday, July 27, 2009

People sometimes think of Oracle Essbase as only suited for use by the Finance department. While it’s true that Essbase “excels” at this (pun intended), the tool can help almost any business function that uses numeric data. Its ability to analyze data in multidimensional ways allows users to “slice and dice” numbers and gain new insight into what’s happening in their business. Once you see how to do this in one area, why not do the same thing somewhere else? Indeed, the goal should be to increase the value of Essbase in your organization by using it in ways you might not have previously considered. Move it out of the Finance department and make yourself an analytics superstar!

Here are a few areas where savvy users of Oracle Essbase can extend it horizontally across multiple business functions:

Sunday, July 26, 2009

As a part of a typical OBI implementation some of the business requirements may be handle exporting or downloading large files with size of many million records in different file formats like XLS, CSV. This in general may be planned to use the OOTB Download feature in OBIEE. Well if this is the case then there may be huge performance bottlenecks just leveraging on OBI services withing a browser.

Marketing Analtics may be explored to handle this requirements. Marketing Analytics has the feature to manage export of large files with several formats

Lets look at the configuration steps

1. we need to configure some marketing objects within OBI Repository2. Lets use the OOTB Marketing Objects for Example Contacts3. Click Manage --> Marketing within an opened OBI Repository to view existing marketing objects

5. In the Segmentation Catalogs Tab. The Customet Profile Segmentation is set as primary segmentaion catalog. In here this customer profile segmentation catalog is actuallya presentation catalog created in OBI Rpd

6. Click on Marketing Contact List List Catalog object which is used to define the list formats for export.

9. Create a list format with the required columns as shown below which are required to be exported and specify the file output format as xls in Options Tab, also check the “Re-qualify list results against original segment criteria” check box to make your list format generic and it works with any segment.

10. Create a simple segment using Contacts target level and attach it with the list format created above (List Preview File Format in the Advanced Options tab).

11. Click the Generate Lists button. In the popup dialog you can issue commands to run the list generation or to preview the list.

12. Find the URL of the Preview List Eg: http://bicg026/analytics/saw.dll?MktgEditExportFormatReport&Action=previewFromSegment&Path=%2Fusers%2Fadministrator%2FCustomer%20List%20for%20Export&SegmentPath=%2Fusers%2Fadministrator%2FWest%20Contacts

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

VendorRate provides ratings given by IT professionals with the intent of helping organizations make better decisions prior to selecting an IT vendor for products or services. Rating takes about three minutes, is fully confidential, rating totals are aggregated, and a vendor's total score and individual scores are always available online.

Highlights of The VendorRate Q2 2009 Report

• IBM Informix received the highest overall ranking with a score of 96

• GovConnection was the top rated reseller with a score of 98

• GovConnection received the highest score ever posted for a VendorRate quarterly report

• BI Consulting Group was the top rated consulting organization with a score of 92

Monday, July 20, 2009

A new Saved Filter "View" Link now automatically appears when filters are displayed on reports (The new link appears in the more recent versions of OBI; I know it is in 10.1.3.4, but am not sure exactly in which version it first appears. ). When clicking on the view link, it will give details of the contents of the saved filter. While this new functionality may be useful in many circumstances, there are reasons you may not want the link to appear either. Unfortunately, there currently is no security surrounding this new saved filter view functionality. However, if you want to hide this view link, a simple css file change can do this for you.

Here you can see the new saved filter view link appearing on the report below ...

When you click on the link, the contents of the saved filter are displayed ...

To remove this "View" link so that it does not display, add the following css entry to the views.css file located in the \OracleBIData\web\res\s_oracle10\b_mozilla_4 ...

Often, developers are asked to use less than ideal data structures to create reports and dashboards in OBIEE. These reports usually involve recreating some kind of list report found in MS Excel or another reporting tool. Recently, I was asked to do just this…

The requirements were that the request needed to filter on a number of specific dates, only use a single dashboard prompt, all without the luxury of a calendar dimension.

My solution was to use a calendar dimension from another subject area, then pass the date value selected to the request filter using a presentation variable. Below is a recap of steps I took to execute the solution:

1. Create a prompt using an “alien” calendar dimension. “Alien” meaning that this calendar dimension can exists in any other subject area, since any table relationships will have no bearing on this interaction.

2. In this case we’re using a Month End Date, and we’ve set the presentation variable name to be “Date_Variable”.

3. Within the request, we’ve set each date field we want to filter to recognize the presentation variable set in the prompt.

4. Add the Prompt and the Request to a dashboard page.

Once the Prompt and the Request have both been placed on a dashboard page, they should interact together, and the end user will be none the wiser. Notice how the value selected in the Prompt is reflected in the Filter View.

I recently presented a session titled "OBIEE Answers on Essbase: The Future of Ad-hoc Analysis" at the Kaleidoscope conference in Monterey, CA (June, 2009). My focus was the interaction between Essbase and OBIEE Answers - - where it is now and where it's going. Topics discussed included:

Essbase administrators should become familiar with the OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) file type "rpd". This "report definition file" contains the object definitions that allow Essbase outlines to be accessed using Oracle Answers and Oracle Dashboards. The presentation shows how to make this connection and begin using these tools together.

Any comments would be appreciated as we all explore this new BI functionality.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Substitution variables act as global placeholders for information that changes regularly. This functionality is frequently used with reports where the time values change over time. You simply store the substitution variable values within Essbase Application Server (EAS) for use at any time. Set once - - retrieve many!

For instance, suppose you create a sales report for June and want to rerun the same report 30 days later when you reach July. Without a substitution variable, you must manually update the Time dimension member to "July" instead of "June". With a substitution variable, the Time dimension member automatically retrieves the value stored within EAS (ie "July").

This is particularly helpful when you have complex reports with multiple time members. No more searching for every instance of where you need to change "June" to "July". The Essbase retrieval handles it for you automatically. This really helps improve overall data integrity.

Create the variable(s) and a corresponding string value within EAS. For example, now any time you retrieve the value "MnthMinus1", you will get the value for "FY06 May". Note that when you retrieve in Excel the syntax requires the ampersand "&" character as a variable prefix (ie: to retrieve data for "MnthMinus1", place "&MnthMinus1" in the cell).

A "before and after" example of an Excel retrieval using substitution variables is shown below.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Oracle Business Intelligence in a high availability environment. It outlines the installation and configuration procedures for the BI components needed to achieve end-to-end availability. The Oracle BI components are configured to use the native clustering, load balancing and failover mechanisms. BI components are deployed in

active-active or active-passive mode to maximize availability. Following diagram shows the deployment of Oracle Business Intelligence for high availability.

· A Load Balancer serves as the entry point and load balances Oracle BI web requests to multiple web servers. Two scenarios for the web tier are shown.

· The second scenario shows a J2EE based application server with BI Presentation Services Plug-in

deployed in a web container in the J2EE server. Deploying the BI web tier in a De-Militarized

Zone (DMZ) and details on communication over firewalls.

· Multiple instances of BI Presentation Services, BI Servers and BI Scheduler components are installed and the Oracle BI environment is configured for clustering, load balancing and failover Of its components using native capability.

Diagram:Deployment of OBIEE for High Availability

OBIEE Installation

This topic provides general guidelines to help you plan the installation of Oracle BI for high availability.

Determine the number of instances of each Oracle BI component that will form part of the deployment

based on your requirements. The maximum number of BI Servers that can participate in a cluster is 16.

BI Scheduler instances participate in the cluster in an active-passive configuration. Only one BI Scheduler

instance is active and processing requests at a given time; the other instances are passive.

Determine which BI components will be co-located. For example, the Primary Cluster Controller, one BI Server

node and BI Scheduler may be installed on one machine. Identify the machines on which you will deploy the

2) If you are co-locating other BI components on this machine (for example, BI Presentation

Services Plug-in) select the other desired components for installation.

· On Windows machines, the Oracle BI Services screen is part of the installation.

1) Enter a domain account to run the BI services. Do not specify a Local System Account.

2) Select the start up type for the services—either manual or automatic.

The installed BI Presentation Services instances are configured to participate in the BI Cluster by setting parameters in the instanceconfig.xml file on each machine that hosts BI Presentation Services.

OBIEE Shared Files and Directories in Cluster Mode.

The BI components deployed in a clustered environment must share certain files and directories as described below. A shared storage device such as NAS or SAN may be used.

Presentation Catalog:

Create a network share for the Presentation Catalog. All instances of BI Presentation Services in

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

UDML is a text based non-public API that may be used to manipulate RPD

This may be used for faster manipulation to metadata objects and create a new instance of RPD especially for creating instances of rpd during migration processes

There are two ways of using UDML

1. Command line utilities2. Text editor

Using Command Line Utilities

There are two command line utilities that are available to use which are available as a part of installed OBI server component. These are located in Root:\OracleBI\server\Bin directory1.nQUDMLGen.exe

This is used to generate UDML from an RPD

The following is a example of passing parameters to use this utility

D:\OracleBI\server\Bin>nQUDMLGen.exe -hnQUDMLGen -U userid [-P [password]] -R repository_pathname -O output_script_pathname[-8] [-N] [-Q] [-S]-h Display this usage information and exit.-8 is for UTF-8-N is for not generating upgrade id-Q is for generating script without security objects-S is for generating script for only security objectsQ and S override each other if both are present

Friday, July 3, 2009

Minnesota-based nQuire Software began to offer a business intelligence suite of products in late 1999. Siebel aquired nQuire in 2001, and Oracle aquired Siebel in 2006. Here is an article published 10 years ago announcing the launch of nQuire eBusiness Analytics which became Siebel Analytics and is now known as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition...

Fri. Aug. 27, 1999From the August 27, 1999 issue of CRN

nQuire Software Inc., a start-up focused on enterprise data access, unveiled its first product, a search engine and related suite of software for accessing and analyzing structured data from disparate internal systems.

"The average person can go home and pull up on the Web all kinds of information, but they go to work and can't even get adequate sales data for a given period because it resides on different platforms," said Larry Barbetta, president and chief executive of nQuire.

The nQuire Suite addresses this issue and provides users with self-service access and analysis of the data stored across various operational systems, data warehouses, datamarts, relational databases and XML-based sources, Barbetta said.

In addition, the nQuire technology enables organizations to deliver better service both inside and outside their corporate walls, Barbetta said. The technology can be used to power enterprise information portals, corporate intranets, business-to-business commerce and Internet customer access, he said.

"The Internet has raised the bar of people's expectations," Barbetta said. However, "the Internet has affected consumers, but it really hasn't been hammered home in corporate space to the degree that it has impacted their computing structure," he said, adding that corporations still have trouble accessing and analyzing information that resides on their internal systems.

"The ability to hide the complexity of data analysis requires an enormous amount of technical savvy," said Bob Moran, vice president of decision support research at the Aberdeen Group Inc., Boston. "It is to nQuire Software's credit that it has been able to accomplish this feat in an Internet/portal context, without requiring enterprises to undergo a disruptive change," he said.

"Delivering accurate and comprehensive information from multiple applications and services has been a challenge for business intelligence," said Hadley Reynolds, research director at The Delphi Group, Boston. "nQuire's multi-repository search capability promises to break down the barriers associated with application and warehouse boundaries, and give portal users a substantially clearer discovery channel for knowledge management or E-business activities."

The nQuire Suite also provides thin-client, browser-based access to the nQuire Server, as well as support for existing reporting, online application processing, query, and development tools and applications capable of querying a relational database management system, the company said.

The browser enables non-technical users to access buried corporate information. "We allow the user to get at the data in the way they think about it, not in the way it's stored," Barbetta said.

Building the company's channel organization is among the first major goals for Duane Cologne, nQuire's vice president of marketing and business development, Barbetta said.

"We plan to leverage our sales model with partnerships with key service providers," he said. "We're talking to both the new-age integrators as well as the 'big dogs,' " he added, referring to the large mainstream integrators.

Before being positioned for the Siebel aquisition, nQuire established several key customer wins at such companies as CSX Transportation, McDonald's, Simon Property Group, and Union Pacific Railroad.

Financial terms of the Siebel acquisition of nQuire were not disclosed. The Oracle acquisition of Siebel was valued at approximately $5.85 billion.

In this post I will demonstrate another way to "integrate" OBIEE with BI Publisher ("BIP"): adding a pre-built BIP report to a Dashboard and configuring it to interact with a Dashboard Prompt.

For this example I've already logged into BIP as "Administrator" and created a report named "BI Publisher Subject Area" including some simple dimensions and facts from the "Paint Exec" demo Subject Area. I've uploaded a simple table template aptly named "SubjectAreaTable" using Word to this report. The resulting report viewed in HTML looks like this:

Step 1: Add a BIP Report to Dashboard

From a blank Dashboard page, drag & drop "BI Publisher Report" object into the blank Column. Click "Properties" then "Browse" to the location of the existing BIP report "BI Publisher Request." (Note what happens when you "hover" over the report name - that's the value of the report's Description field.)

Click on the report name and then OK. Click OK again in the Properties window (accept the default parameters for now). Save your changes then view the new Dashboard. Note that the standard BIP controls are available - you can select a Template & format and even choose to deliver the output using the standard BIP options (which are a bit different from OBIEE's options).

Step 2: Configure the BIP Report to respond to a Parameter for "Region"

Click the "Parameters" option in the left-hand nav, then click "New" to create a new parameters.

Fill in the values as follows:

Identifier: "REGION_NAME"

This value is fairly arbitrary, but as you will see below we will be referencing it in Answers so it doesn't hurt to consider some sort of naming convention. I am also deliberately making the identifier different than the name of the Presentation Column in Answers to clarify the distinction between the two.

Data type: "String"

I've had spotty results using anything but "String" -- Date in particular gave me trouble.

Parameter type: "Text"

There are some interesting uses for other types, but we'll save that discussion for later.

Display Label: "Region Name"

This value can also be arbitrary

Text Field Size: [leave blank]Options: [leave blank]

Both of these are also out of scope for this discussion.

Now we click into the Data Set (within the Data Model "folder") and add the line "WHERE Markets.Region = :REGION_NAME" to the SQL Query input box. Note we are using the "Identifier" of the Parameter we just created.

Save your changes (click the disk icon in the upper LH corner) and view the results - Note the results by default will be blank because we haven't entered a value. Enter "CENTRAL REGION" in the parameter box and click "View."

Step 3: Add a Prompt to your dashboard

Go back to Answers and create a new Dashboard Prompt based on the "Region" Presentation Column. Here's the important part: Configure the prompt to set a Presentation Variable named - you guessed it - "REGION_NAME" and save your new prompt.

OK last step: Still in Answers, go back to modify your Dashboard and add the new prompt. Might as well put it on top of the existing BI Publisher report.

Save your changes and view the Dashboard. Again, because the default value for Region is blank, you won't get any results unless you pick one from your new prompt.

But, uh oh, how can I select ALL regions? The "All Choices" selection doesn't seem to work the same way with BI Publisher as it does with native OBIEE reports...

Hmm. How about I give a banana to whomever can chime in with the solution to THAT problem?

Remember that reports in BI Publisher can be created against other data sources besides OBIEE... but the Dashboard integration is essentially the same. I'll save that topic for another post.

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